Posts from January 2009

January 21, 2009

Today, like everybody else pretty much everywhere, we
watched the Inauguration. We saved the champagne for this evening, but that
didn’t prevent us from being tired and emotional for much of the morning.

The ceremony itself didn’t last very long, but the post-game
analysis has been going on for hours. I think it may never end. Too much
excitement for one day.

Things I would like to know: why Dick Cheney was in a
wheelchair (really); what Hillary Clinton was thinking during the swearing-in
(really); and what was with that E. Alexander poem?

Later, to please T. Middy, I told him that he was the
president of our marriage. But then, we agreed, it was like the Bush
presidency, and I was Cheney, i.e. manipulative and conniving and really in
charge of everything, not to mention attention-seeking (see wheelchair, above).

In the new spirit of responsibility, we had a
chickpea/tomato stew for dinner, while watching Simon Schama talking about
American history. And then I went back to work.

January 11, 2009

In Paris it was cold, but not in a bone-crushing,
nose-bleeding St Louis way: temperatures were around freezing every day, with
light snow a couple of days. Once we were on the Rue Jacob shopping for tea
towels – because a holiday is not a holiday unless Team Middy buys a tea towel
or six, the more expensive the better – and snow began to fall. It’s an
attractive street anyway, and a dusting of icing-sugar snow made it even
prettier. This was one of the many chocolate shops we frequented, on a non-snow
day.

And here is more chocolate, spotted elsewhere.

I’ve never been in Paris when it snowed; I’ve only visited
once in the wintertime, just before Christmas some time in the late 90s.
Usually I’ve sweltered there in the summer, starting with the first visit in
1978, with my parents and brother: I celebrated my thirteenth birthday while we
were there. That was our first and last European family trip, though it wasn’t
even the complete family: my sister, seven years older, had already extracted
herself from group holidays.

My father enjoyed various driving escapades, including an
illicit circuit of Trafalgar Square, a wild trip around the Arc de Triomphe,
many forays the wrong way down one-way streets (mainly in the UK, where he
would point to the car’s “Visitor to Britain” sticker whenever challenged), and
some of his patented Kiri Morris Adventures in Long-Distance Driving, including
one the length of France and the breadth of Switzerland all in one day.This latter trip was especially impressive
given his determination to avoid toll-charging fast highways. That was the day
we ended up in a small town near the Swiss-Austrian border, staying at the
Hotel Bahnhof – the meaning of which became evident many, many times through
the night. That was also the day we had dinner outside at some rustic place in
Switzerland and saw a wedding party ride by in a horse and trap. Also, it might
have been the day we stopped in Liechtenstein in order to experience its scenic
principality-ness, and, waiting in the car at some border crossing, encountered
an Australian who came over to chat. (We also had a New Zealand sticker on the
car, of course.) In his car, the Australian must have loosened his belt, and as
he approached us, he was languidly re-buckling it. When he leaned in the
passenger window, where my brother, wearing Mickey Mouse ears, was sitting, the
first thing he said, in a broad Australian accent, was: “’Scuse my belt.”
Thirty years later, my brother and I still say this to each other, and my niece
has caught onto it as well.

Anyway, on that first trip to Paris we stayed at the Hotel
Regent on rue Madame, a block from the Luxembourg Gardens. TM and I went
looking for it and found two hotels: one of them looked sort of familiar, but
the name has changed. There my brother and I, in a small room far from our
parents, had our first experience of a bidet. We had no idea what it was. After
much discussion, we decided that it was a foot-washing device. My mother came
by and put us straight: we were disgusted, of course, and a little hysterical.

My brother was eleven then, and still short.(He’s six-foot-two, I think, these
days.) I was about to turn thirteen, and was almost as tall as I am now, with
the figure of a stick insect. I was acutely self-conscious, and hated walking
past all those cafés where people sat looking out at passers-by.My hair was bobbed, with a heavy
fringe. I wore culottes a lot, and a braid-trimmed butterfly-sleeve top I’d
been forced to make in sewing at school the year before. My sister did most of
the work on it, because I had no ability or enthusiasm for sewing, preferring
peer dissections of the latest episode of Starsky and Hutch, or daydreams about
becoming a member of Charlie’s Angels. Most of the time during that Paris trip
I wore jandals/flip-flops, because my feet were too big for all known shoes. On
my birthday, during breakfast at the hotel, my parents and brother sang to me
sotto voce, and the woman serving us, who’d seemed generally impervious to
human emotion, smiled and nodded to me. My parents gave me a ruby-embedded gold
signet ring with my initials on it, because that was what I wanted more than
anything.

We went to the Louvre, of course, to see the Venus de Milo
and the Mona Lisa, and I remember seeing the outside of the newly opened
Pompidou Centre. My father made my brother and me climb the stairs of the Arc
de Triomphe, and catch the lift to the top of the Eiffel Tower. (I hate lifts,
especially ones that climb in a diagonal fashion, so I’ll never do this again.)
My mother didn’t join in with either of these view-seeking activities. She’d
lived in Paris in the mid-50s, and was over all the sightseeing. She was much more excited
about visiting all her old haunts on the Left Bank.

I don’t remember any specifics of those haunts, so for this
trip I asked my mother for some details. She lived on the top floor of a
building on rue des Saint-Pères in the Sixth, not far from the Bon Marché
department store. It’s a very chic neighborhood these days: Ferragamo is on the
ground floor of her building. Here are some pictures of it, with me standing by
the front door.I’m wearing my new
red hat, bought at Galerie Lafayette the day we arrived. This is the same place
my mother went to buy a much smarter sort of hat more than fifty years ago when
the Queen Mother was visiting the British Embassy.

In those days, she said, Bon Marchéwas a joke, provincial and dowdy. Now
the world’s oldest department store is smart, like Harvey Nichols: all the hats
I tried on there were beautiful but very costly. The food hall next door was
amazing, more extensive (and expensive) than Selfridge’s. If we lived anywhere
nearby, it would be the end of us.

While wandering the neighborhood on a Hemingway/Stein/Joyce
Moveable Feast odyssey, we also came across the Alliance Francais, where my
mother studied. I'm not sure if she ever ate at the Closerie des Lilas in
Montparnasse, where Hemingway liked to sit writing in a corner. Both of
them would be shocked by how fancy the place is these days, all red and gold
and sparkling. We had lunch there on New Year’s Day, and TM opted for the
world’s largest oysters.

This is possibly one of Hemingway’s corners. I’m saying it
is, anyway.

Between the lunch bill, the tip for the solicitous toilette
attendant, and the tip for the pianist, we were cleaned out. We couldn’t even
come up with one Euro for the coat-check. In the 20s, Hemingway could sit there
for hours sipping a café crème and writing The Sun Also Rises. Nowadays, the
café crème would cost as much as a meal somewhere else. (T. Middy had a hot
drink at Café de Flore, and I think it was seven Euros, or what TM
romantically described as “ten bucks of hot chocolate.”)

We walked home to the little apartment on rue Cardinale via
rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where Hemingway lived above a now long-gone sawmill.
I was about to write “to our little
apartment,” but Dinaw Mengestu might be annoyed by our appropriation of it.
It’s such a perfect place, all low-beams and slanting floors. T. Middy bashed
his head at least three times on a low beam, and I took a stupid tumble over
the two-hundred-year-old step leading to the bedroom, blackening a toenail and
grazing my arm. Places we can’t be trusted in: chocolate shops, cafés, character
properties.

We spent much of the time in Paris walking, walking,
walking. It’s the city in Europe I’ve visited most often. When I lived in
England, I made various short, cheap, pizza-in-St-Michel-eating trips there
with various friends and boyfriends: we’d do the train/ferry/train thing, staying
at no-star hotels with tiny lifts, and spending all our time looking at
paintings. I had a number of business trips there in the 90s, which were all
much less enjoyable than the earlier visits, despite the nicer hotels and
restaurants, and the expense account. Those trips always seemed to involve
meetings in smoke-clogged offices or bars with various European colleagues.
Half the time we ended up drinking stew-like coffee out of a machine, which was
only palatable if you added a great deal of sugar. No wonder I was so wired all
the time.

Once I was there for just one night, and my French
colleagues took me out for sushi. I lived in New York at the time, and didn’t
want to eat sushi in Paris, but I’d just flown in from Detroit and had to go to
London the next day: I was too tired to argue, especially as I’d spent the
afternoon sitting on my hotel bed, answering e-mails. Another time a group of
us ended up in one colleague’s hotel room, squishing mini-bar peanuts under his
bedcovers, and singing, over and over, “The Way You Look Tonight,” until the
hotel management called to say other guests were complaining. On yet another
pan-European-colleagues night out, eleven of us drifted hand-in-hand through
various metro stations, so we wouldn’t get separated; I had to buy us tickets
and make sure they got through the turnstiles safely, because everyone had lost
their heads. We’d been in meetings all day, and nobody wanted to be sensible or think anymore.

Once I stayed on for the weekend with my colleague David
Kuehn, and my friends Pete and Deborah came over from London to join us. I
bought myself one of the stupid things I was always buying myself back then, in
order to make up for everything else that was driving me crazy: a ring-watch
shaped like a flower. Afterwards, we wandered the streets, Pete and Deborah
holding hands and kissing, David and I talking about work. “They’re in Paris,”
he said, “and we’re in Detroit.”

The last time I was there was with T. Middy, eight years ago,
at the end of our honeymoon. It was October: we’d just spent a week or so in
Brittany. We stayed on the Ile-St-Louis. When the taxi pulled up to our hotel,
I saw it was right next door to the little shop where I’d bought the
ring-watch. The shop still sold a lot of over-priced tat, to which (TM alleges)
I’m inexorably drawn. I didn’t buy anything there on that trip: I wasn’t in
Detroit anymore. On this trip, we walked past same shop, but we didn’t go
inside. There was too much to see on the streets, still decorated for
Christmas, and it was so cold: we just wanted to keep walking.

January 07, 2009

It’s a new year, and I know it should be a
forgive-and-forget, looking-ahead, making-resolutions time. It’s also ages
since I wrote, and I have lots of pictures – of Christmas, of our trip to Paris
– to post. But first I must get all this hatred for airlines (or “evil-doers”,
as I now think of them) out of my system. This post will be long, and
over-detailed, because I have a lot of venting to do.

As the constant reader knows, I’ve done lots of flying about
this year. Too much, perhaps. There have been some highlights, like getting
upgraded to whatever Air New Zealand calls business class these days, after the
bird-strike/Victoria Beckham incident this summer. Of course, in order to enjoy
that particular highlight, I had to spend the night in an airport hotel,
without luggage, and spend c. eight hours in the Koru Club at LAX, looking
forlorn and disheveled. I’m trying to think of any other highlights, but that’s
about it, aside from the time they brought around a tray of Afghan biscuits in
the Koru Club, and perhaps the time they let us board late in Auckland so we
could watch New Zealanders winning Olympic medals in rowing.

Lowlights, however, have been ample. Often they involve
these so-called partnerships between airlines, and lead to a conversation like
this:

United person: Here is your boarding pass for the LA flight.
You’ll have to get the boarding pass for your international travel when you
arrive at LAX.

Me (thinking of time it takes to catch bus to other terminal,
stand in line at check-in, etc, and worrying about tight connection, chance of
losing my seating assignment and getting stuck in a middle seat for twelve
hours WHICH HAS HAPPENED BEFORE): Why can’t you issue it? It’s all on the same
ticket, and Air New Zealand is part of the Star Alliance.

United: Because you didn’t book the ticket through United.

Me: But when I fly from New Zealand, they give me both
boarding passes, even when I don’t book the ticket through Air New Zealand.

United: We cannot issue a boarding pass for another airline,
even a partner airline, unless you book the whole ticket through United. Now go
away and enjoy the lack of facilities in Louis Armstrong Airport, like the PJs
coffee house that closes at four, and don’t even think of visiting the Red
Carpet Club, because we don’t have one.[That last sentence was implied, rather than stated aloud.]

OK. So that’s the United rule. Except the next time I fly
United, I’m given both boarding passes, even though I didn’t book the ticket
through United. And then the time after that, I’m NOT given the second boarding
pass. And so on. When I ask Air New Zealand about this, they say that United
should issue the boarding pass. These two airlines need relationship
counseling.

Other United lowlights: no food served on the
three-and-a-half flight from LAX to New Orleans, though they do offer lame
“snack boxes” for sale – nothing like a sandwich, say, because the flight is
too short. No free drinks served on international flights, as we discovered
flying to London: you’ll need to cough up six dollars. And, as T. Middy found
out on his fourteen-hour flight to Sydney, no TV-screens-in-seatbacks, just
four movies played back to back on those small cabin screens. (Note to United:
this is why we usually fly with partner airlines.)

And this conversation, when I was checking in for my flight
back to New Orleans at LAX in September, after spending the night there: at
certain times of year, apparently, there is no way you can fly in from New
Zealand and get back to New Orleans on the same day, even via Denver.

Me (after the machine has told me it’s too late to check
in): Excuse me, I’m not being allowed to check in, but it’s more than an hour
until my flight leaves.

United (reading itinerary, saying nothing at all, not
changing facial expression, printing out boarding pass, handing it to me,
tagging my luggage, not saying anything at all. Not a word.)

My flight time had changed to forty minutes
or so earlier, and an e-mail had been sent to me in the middle of the night.
But that morning I didn’t check e-mails: I got straight into the shuttle van
for the airport, and then spent two hours driving around Los Angeles. I don’t
think airlines should count on people having internet access at all times,
especially when they’re in transit. And – call me old-fashioned – I think that
people who work in Customer Service should be polite and helpful, rather than
surly and bitter. Or at least they should know how to mask their bitterness,
the way waitresses and teachers do.

Today I checked my Mileage Plus account, and discovered that
at least four trans-Pacific trips are missing, as well as the trips to Sydney
and all the trips to Wellington, though I know my account number was in the
system. To ask for these (more than 30,000 miles) to be credited, I have to
supply ticket numbers and seating assignments. So now it’s play hunt-the-boarding-pass
time. This may be Air New Zealand’s fault. United can’t be THAT bad.

Not when there’s Delta and Air France. These two airlines
make United/Air NZ look like exemplars of marital bliss. Delta and Air France
are in some sort of alliance, but it’s one of mistrust, non-communication, and
mutual frustration. I think they may be about to break up. Maybe they should.
Their relationship is extremely dysfunctional.

In October, when T. Middy and I decided to celebrate my
return from the deepest south (and what he sulkily termed our “long-distance
marriage”) by spending the New Year holiday in Paris, it all seemed very
straightforward. We were going to be in St Louis for Christmas, so we’d fly out
of St Louis on Boxing Day and connect at some more eastern point to a Paris
flight. We could book the whole thing through Delta. We were routed through JFK
on the way out, and through Atlanta on the return. I went online and chose all
our seating assignments, including a group-of-two on one side of the Air France
Airbus.

The amiable and generous Dinaw Mengestu offered us the use
of his Paris flat, while he and his fiancée were in Ethiopia. We booked a hotel
in St Louis for the night we returned, Friday. We left our car with the Middy
family, and arranged to take TM’s mother out for lunch the next day, to
celebrate her 80th birthday. Actually, this was a ruse: we were
charged with getting her to the surprise party TM’s sister was organizing. Our
plan was to attend the party and then drive part of the way back to New
Orleans, staying somewhere in southern Missouri that night, arriving home on
Sunday afternoon.

Instead, this is what happened. On the outward leg, we got a
taste of the chaos and eccentricity that is the Air France seating system. Five
days before we left, TM called Air France to check on our seating assignments.
He was told that we had none at all, and the seats I’d booked back in October
were unbookable, because they were always reserved (for unclear reasons). But
we could have another pair, in a nearby row, so everything would be fine.
Except maybe it wouldn’t, because at this point it was too close to the day of
travel.

When we checked in at St Louis, about eight hours before our
Paris flight was due to leave from JFK, we found we’d been separated and placed
on different sides of the plane. The Delta agent shrugged, and said we’d have
to speak to the Air France agent at JFK. So there we lined up for some time in
the general melee, watching while agent after agent closed up his or her
counter, until it was down to two people working. The guy who helped us, at
last, was very nice and tried to help, something we found of most of the Air
France employees at JFK and at Charles De Gaulle. But he couldn’t get us seats
together. The flight was very full, he said, and there was the business of
“unlocking” seats, which he couldn’t do; the reservations we’d made in October,
and the conversation we’d had earlier in the week, meant nothing.

While we were waiting near the gate, I called Delta and Air
France to investigate. The Air France agent said she couldn’t access our
reservation at all because we’d booked through Delta, even though the agent T.
Middy had dealt with earlier in the week had been able to call up the booking
without a problem. The Delta agent said that the flight was not very full, so
not to stress out – we’d be able to get reassigned once the unlocking took
place. I told her that the flight was, in fact, very full. She said she
couldn’t see that on her system. Also, she told me, I shouldn’t worry about the
return journey, because that flight wasn’t full either. When I expressed doubt
about her ability to see into the dark heart of the Air France booking system,
she called an Air France agent, and told me that our seating request for the
return flight had been duly noted. But Delta could never do anything but
request seat assignments, because it was all up to Air France. I asked her if
this meant that we should have booked through Air France rather than Delta, but
she said it all came down to the eleventh-hour unlocking of seats. I don’t
think anyone actually knows what this means, but a lot of airline employees
talk about it the way people in the Middle Ages might have referred to the
onset of the Black Death, as mysterious and depressing and beyond anyone’s
control.

And Air France, I’ve learned, loves to lock up those seats.
We saw some friends from London when we were in Paris, and they said they’d had
the same experience on a flight to Bordeaux: their family of five had been
separated, despite having booked seats together, and there was much talk of the
drama of unlocking and its total impossibility. Later, at CDG, I was talking to
an American who said he, his wife, and their small child had all been separated
on an Air France flight to India, even though they thought they’d secured
seating assignments together. It seems there’s nothing anyone can do about it,
not even check in hours in advance, because all the mystical unlocking goes on
at the last minute.

Finally, at the gate, an agent instantly gave us seats
together, a pair of two by the window. Unlocked – voila!The flight was very full, but we could
sit together in the newly unlocked area. We were happy at last. The food was
pretty good on board, the best Economy airline food I can remember. Drinks were
free, including an aperitif of champagne, and there were TV screens in our
seatbacks. Our bags arrived; we bought tickets and caught the train into Paris
without a problem. We then had a lovely holiday, which I will talk about in
another, happier post.

And then: the long journey home. On Friday morning, we
returned to CDG, arriving several hours before our flight was due to depart.
Too late! The flight was over-booked, we were told, and we would have to go on
standby. A lot of people around us were hearing the same thing. Nobody was
happy. The stress of the situation was exacerbated by the insanely long time it
took to get through Immigration (more than 30 minutes in a queue of hundreds of
people, with only two people checking passports) and Security (another half an
hour, though at least they don’t make you take off your shoes). At the gate,
everyone was standing in various snaking lines, for no apparent reason, as the
flight was delayed and nobody was allowed to board for almost an hour. One
agent tried to deal with all of us left-behinds, including several families –
two of which had a mixture of seats and standby notices.Everything depended, we were told, on
people transferring from other flights: if their flights were delayed arriving,
some of us would be able to wriggle on.

After everyone boarded, she told us only three could wriggle
on: the two standby members of one family, who looked beyond relieved, and a
fifteen-year-old boy traveling alone. The rest of us would have to stay overnight
at an airport hotel; they’d try to find us flights for the next day. This
process, of sitting in another area, waiting while the agent assigned to us
tried to get us seats on a flight home, took hours. By the time we had our
boarding passes for Saturday, it was getting dark outside. I used the
ten-minute phone card I was given to call the hotel in St Louis and re-book for
Saturday. TM sent a Blackberry message to his sister telling her we were going
to miss the surprise party. The agent kept coming to talk to us, asking for
ideas of other cities where we could connect to St Louis – I suggested JFK and
Dulles. Some time later she returned: she could get us to the US, but not on
any connecting flight. Finally, in exasperation she pleaded with her supervisor
to unlock some seats on the Atlanta flight, and this worked. Of course, it
meant that we were bumping people with reservations for the next day, just as
we’d been bumped that day.

Another night in Paris doesn’t sound bad, I know. But we
didn’t have another night in Paris: we had a night at the Park Inn outside
Roissy-en-France. T. Middy was sick: he’d almost thrown up on the train that
morning, and was clammy, feverish, and nauseous. And our luggage had been
checked and could not be retrieved. So we went to the Park Inn, part of a
charmless industrial park of jerrybuilt hotels ten minutes drive away, a hotel
so given to primary colors it appeared to be made of LEGO. We had our
free dinner, which was OK, particularly the free-glass-of-wine part, and
listened to everyone else in the dining room complain about getting bumped from
their flights. (“Welcome Air France!” read the sign outside the restaurant.) TM
needed to sleep, and we’d decided to get to the airport first thing in the
morning, just in case. It’s not a bad place to spend time – attractive, not
noisy, you can get manicures and/or decent sandwiches – and there were no major
lines at Immigration this time.

We got on the full plane – avoiding the gaze of the angry
and despairing people clustered around the stand-by desk, complaining that they
had reservations, that their families could not be separated, etc – and arrived
in Atlanta more or less on time. In Atlanta we had about half an hour of false
hope. “This is so much better than LAX and JFK,” we told each other. The TSA
workers seemed non-belligerent and willing to speak. (Elsewhere, they favor
curt nods, rolled eyes, and other minimal gestures over actual language, unless
they’re shouting at people who don’t speak English.) The lines were long, but
moved swiftly. Our bags came out right away, and there were helpful people to
point us to the transfer area. We went through security again right away,
without having to ride to another terminal.

But on the other side of security, it was a different story.
We had no boarding passes for the flight to St Louis, because Air France said
it couldn’t issue them. Of course they couldn’t. But we were booked onto the
next flight, and had a piece of paper to prove it. I joined the line of over 50
people at the Delta desk, many of whom had missed connections and were frantic,
trying to get to overseas destinations. Someone at the Info desk told TM we
should just go to the gate. I’d just overheard this conversation in the line.

Desperate Passengers: We’re trying to get on the flight to
Puerto Rico!

Delta guy, working the line: You can get your boarding
passes at the gate.

DPs: We were just there, and they wouldn’t give us anything!
They said we had to line up here.

Delta guy: You go back there, and tell them to give you your
boarding passes.

DPs: What if they say no?

Delta guy: You tell them that THE SUPERVISOR SAID TO GIVE
YOU YOUR BOARDING PASSES.

DPs: What is your name?

Delta guy: Just tell them THE SUPERVISOR.

I whispered to TM, as we ran to our gate, that we could
mention that THE SUPERVISOR thing if necessary. It wasn’t, as it turned out.
Not that we had seats on the flight. Oh no. The Delta agent told us the
following: that there was no record of us on this flight; that the piece of
paper we had from Air France was, in effect, so much meaningless nonsense; that
we weren’t even on standby, though she would add us to the long, long list; and
that it was a very full flight and we were unlikely to get seats.

But we did, after a tense wait while everyone else was
seated and all the other standby names were called. And on the flight itself,
we especially enjoyed the announcement made towards the end. There’d been
turbulence, so the drinks service had been abandoned. The flight attendant
wanted to apologize to those of us – most of us – who did not get the chance to
get, as she said, “a cup of water, or … or a hot drink.”

So much for an aperitif, T. Middy said; now we’re reduced to
“a cup of water,” which we don’t even get.

At St Louis, it was busy, busy, busy, and the baggage took
ages to appear on the carousel. Not our bags, of course. They were AWOL. In the
Delta baggage office, small and crowded, we waited our turn. The agents there
were clearly tired from dealing with the annoyed general public. They were
snippy and frowning. One of them raised her voice when some
non-English-speakers didn’t know how to describe the color of their missing
bags. The man gestured at his jacket sleeve. “IS THAT BROWN OR GREEN, SIR? BROWN OR
GREEN?” We were next. We handed over our luggage receipts. She looked at them
as though they were Tarot cards, maybe, or missives from an alien planet. She
could not deal with Air France receipts, she said; we’d have to wait for the
other agent.

We waited. The other agent explained that Delta had no
record of our luggage, because it had been checked by Air France, and their
numbers did not compute with the Delta system. Did we see it in Atlanta? Good.
Because otherwise, Delta would have no clue as to the whereabouts of any of our
bags. Maybe our luggage would arrive on the next flight, around midnight, or
maybe not. Delta could not tell us. We’d have to wait until the morning. After
some sob-storying from us, the agent said she’d call us on T. Middy’s cell
phone if the bags came in that night. We decided that if she called, we’d come
back from the airport hotel to retrieve them.

There was no call, so when we got up on Sunday morning it
was Day Three for the clothes. After more than 48 hours without a shave, TM was
developing a beard, which he alleged was George Clooney-esque. You be the
judge.

He called the 800 number we’d been given, and was on hold
for half an hour. (We couldn’t check online, because we hadn’t taken our
computers to France. It was supposed to be a relaxing vacation.) Good news: our
bags were in St Louis. They’d arrived last night. Thanks for calling, Delta
agent!

So that’s about it. We caught the shuttle back to the
airport; we retrieved our bags, returned to the hotel, and got to change our
clothes. TM shaved off his grizzly whiskers. We visited the Middy family to
collect the car, pack up all the Christmas gifts, and hear about the 80th
birthday party we missed. Then we drove for ten hours so we could get home in
time for TM to go to work on Monday morning.

Here are the luggage tags of meaninglessness.

I don’t want to fly again any time soon. I have to go to
Chicago in February for the AWP conference, and I’m paying more to get a direct
flight. Also, I’m only taking hand luggage, even if it means dressing like
Heidi en route. I’ll probably get snow-bound, or diverted to various regional
airports. Or else there’ll be so much turbulence, I won’t even get my cup of
water.

One good thing about all this, that we’ll appreciate long
after all the hassle of the trip back is forgotten, more or less: the 1200
Euros in compensation we received from Air France for getting bumped off our
original flight. This will cover our excessive eating and drinking for the week
in Paris, turning what was an extravagant holiday into something approaching a
cheap one. We were offered a choice – 600 Euros each in cash, paid into a
credit card, or a travel voucher for 800 Euros each. Sorry Air France, but
we’re in no hurry to fly with you again. Despite the aperitifs.

And now, after all this complaining, here are some pictures
of our place decorated for Christmas. These were taken just before our party,
the one day of the year when most of the apartment is tidy, and the piles of
magazines are exiled to the back room. All of this should have come down today,
I know: it’s carnival season now, time to move on.